Sometimes critics look for indigenous tendencies to explain the weirdness of the Peruvian 20c poet César Vallejo (Trilce, 1922), but it occurred to be as i was reading in Eshleman & Rubia Barcia's Complete Posthumous Poetry that V.'s lines are full of things almost like kennings, & that in fact he writes many poems like a series of riddles (that don't necessarily have a solution); a complete Viking.:
"Relate to yourself grasping
the tail of the fire and the horns
where the mane ends its fiercy race;
break apart, but in circles;
take form, but in curved columns;
describe yourself atmospheric, Being of smoke,
in the double time step of a skeleton." (p. 161)
"What's got into me, that I have placed
on my shoulders an egg instead of a mantle?" (163)
"Accordion of the afternoon, on this corner,
piano of the morning, that afternoon;
clarion of flesh,
drum with a single stick,
guitar without a fourth string, lots of fifth,
and how many gatherings of dumb friends!
and what a nest of tigers in tobacco!" (165)
"HERRING GULLS
Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher
—Baudelaire
No, Charles: we’re all in an airborne
pack, whirling widdershins around
the trawler, on the main chance.
Who needs lightfoot grace when we can bob
jauntily abreast the rollers, or hold our intrafamilial
squabble midair? Brownbreasted juvenile
cedes that fishgut scrap to his whitegowned auntie.
We’ve never heard of loneliness; we live
in a flying heap, a host, an involute skein
of wings. And even the albatross—
all right then—six months away from shore,
but every year the same island, every year,
same ungainly strut to the nest with the same
gray-eyed partner, shared charge of the sole pale egg."
--Rachel Trousdale in Four Way Review (via @monikacassel.bsky.social)
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